Cinema Studies

A visionary masterwork from the renowned director of Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money is a mesmerizing odyssey into the real, imagined and nightmarish memories of the elderly Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant living in Lisbon.

With the return of their friend Ahmad from Germany, a group of old college pals (two married couples and a brother and sister, along with three young kids) decide to reunite for a weekend outing by the Caspian Sea. The fun starts right away as they quickly catch on to the plan of lively Sepideh, who has brought along Elly, her daughter’s kindergarten teacher, in hopes of setting her up with recently divorced Ahmad.

What is the job of a diplomat for a country that does not exist? With this question, acclaimed filmmaker Eric Baudelaire initiates a wide-ranging correspondence with his friend Maxim Gvinjia, former Minister of Foreign Affairs for Abkhazia, a country with physical borders, a government, and its own flag, but has not been recognized as a nation.

An enthralling tale of love, temptation and betrayal, directed by major post-New Wave auteur Philippe Garrel and starring his son, actor Louis Garrel. Shot in lustrous, widescreen black and white by the great Willy Kurant (Masculin Feminin, Under Satan’s Sun).

A haunting masterpiece and possibly the last film from the great Tsai Ming-liang, Stray Dogs is a visually powerful work about a single father and his two young children trying to survive on the streets of Taipei. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

The roles women are expected to play in today's society, and the difficulties in balancing career and family, are the central issues deftly explored in Robert Greene's acclaimed documentary Actress. Using elements of melodrama and cinema verit", the film follows the travails of a former actress-turned-housewife as she prepares to make a comeback.

A marvelous exploration of Cezanne’s “Still Life with Apples,” Leo Hurwitz and Manny Kirchheimer probe the mysteries of this modern masterpiece by simply observing the work, closely, without commentary, focusing on the details – the brushstrokes, the abstract shapes, the color juxtapositions, the hidden pictures – discovering, perhaps, its secrets.

In Norte, the End of History, one of the world"s most uncompromising cinematic visionaries, Filipino director Lav Diaz delivers an extraordinary reimagining of Dostoevsky"s "Crime and Punishment" that is both an intimate human drama and a cosmic treatise on the origin of evil.

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, Maidan chronicles the civil uprising that toppled the government of Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich and has since developed into an international crisis. Filmed in stunning long takes, sans commentary, Maidan is a record of a momentous historical event and an extraordinary study of the popular uprising as a social, cultural and philosophical phenomenon.

Never before available, Thom Andersen's landmark documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself explores the tangled relationship between the movies and their fabled hometown Â– as seen entirely though the films themselves.Newly remastered, this kaleidoscopic tour through the metropolis' real and cinematic history, from the silent era to modern times, is an extraordinary achievement, unlike any documentary that has come before or since.

A revelatory documentary by Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself) and film critic Noel Burch, Red Hollywood, which has been remastered and re-edited, examines the films made by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist and offers a radically difference perspective on a key period in the history of American cinema.

A fascinating investigation into the work of photographer and cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, Thom Andersen’s (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood, Reconversao) much-lauded documentary incorporates a biographical overview of its subject with a re-animation of his historic sequential photographs as well as concise and innovative analysis.

Mixing personal stories, political history, revolutionary propaganda and film theory, artist Eric Baudelaire illuminates the idealism and radicalism of left-wing extremist movements of the 1970s by interweaving the stories of two of its protagonists: May Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army, and Masao Adachi, the revered Japanese director who gave up cinema to take up arms.

In 1967, following the success of Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni planned to make his next film in Japan. The project was cancelled (Antonioni shot Zabriskie Point instead), but he did publish his ideas for the film.” In this brilliant documentary, filmmaker Eric Baudelaire remakes Antonioni’s lost film through photographs, real life anecdotes, correspondences and critical discourse.

Joaquim Pinto has been an instrumental figure in Portuguese cinema for over 30 years, as a director of his own films, or producer and sound designer for other renowned filmmakers. In What Now? Remind Me Pinto, who has been living with HIV, looks back at his life in cinema, at his friendships and loves, and at the mysteries of art and nature.

In the wonderful Art of Observing Life, renowned documentarian Marina Goldovskaya delivers a master class in cinema verité and an appreciation of the filmmakers who transformed the Documentary. Composed of intimate conversations with Robert Drew and Richard Leacock (Primary), Allan King (A Married Couple), Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens), Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room), Lionel Rogosin (On The Bowery) & others.

Produced by the directors of Sweetgrass and Leviathan, Manakamana is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind documentary experience. Filmed entirely inside the narrow confines of a cable car, high above a jungle in Nepal, that transports villagers to an ancient mountaintop temple, it is an acute ethnographic investigation into culture, religion, technology and modernity.